In this study we use data envelopment analysis to decompose the overall economic efficiency of a sample of ethanol plants into three subcomponents: technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and a new component we call marketing efficiency. The relative importance of these sources of efficiency...

Energy is a critical input in production and the main sources of energy in modern economies are exhaustible. Therefore sustaining aggregate consumption across generations requires reduction of the quantity of energy used per unit of output. Energy policies incentivize the deployment of new...

Griliches' k-shift, a crucial parameter in the welfare evaluation of technological change, is shown to be equal to the radial rate of technological change plus a vector of commodity bias parameters obtained from the distance function. The analysis permits decomposition of sectoral productivity...

Traditional measures of technological change, such as the rate of technical change, are based on producer-oriented prices. Here, we employ a general equilibrium analysis of an open economy to examine how the consumer welfare gain from a technological change, measured as Hicksian equivalent...

Tobin and Houthakker's (1950-51) work on consumer behavior under quantity rationing has been extended by many authors, especially through the use of duality theory. This paper uses duality theory to extend the work on demand theory under rationing to the case of producer behavior under quotas....

This paper examines changes in agricultural productivity in 18 developing countries over the period 1961 to 1985. Because input price series are not available, we use the concept of distance function and the nonparametric, quantity-based Malmquist index approach, and contrast the results with...

Agricultural production quotas are policy instruments that many countries have adopted as a means of transferring income from consumers to producers. Here the partial equilibrium approach of Allais and Diewert is adapted to measure the efficiency loss in the production sector due to quotas....

This report presents aggregate data on agricultural inputs and outputs for 18 developing countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Portugal, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and Zambia for 1961-88.

This paper addresses the issue of measuring welfare losses due to imposition of a production quota. The topic of welfare measurement is important in agriculture because production quotas are a ubiquitous component of agricultural policy. While it is probably true that in the arena of policy...